Making Minions…Preschool Style
It’s Robot Building Time!!!
Giant is 4. But he really loves building robots with daddy. So today for our Math time, we worked on building a Castor Bot from nxtprograms.com. This is a awesome site with easy to understand instructions and great bot designs!
What better way to practice real math? I should add that we played a Go-Fish game where he matched up numerals and the names of numbers, and did a lot of counting to check the matches—I do think it’s valuable to practice (in FUN ways) needed math skills. However, it is so powerful to use that learning right away in a real life application! After we build, I hope to program it with Giant using Daddy’s programming tool: Enchanting.
Building used a lot of basic math skills:
Counting (such as how many parts were needed, or how many holes long a piece should be:)
Comparing and contrasting. Like when he tried to find identical building pieces…:
…and like when I had him put pieces together just like I did (there were a lot of complementary components, which enabled some great scaffolding as I helped him see how to build something without just doing it for him):
It was a lot for a 4 year old to focus on. We adopted a lego dude as our driver, and we pretended we were building an awesome robot race car for him. Whenever Giant started to loose focus, I’d get the driver to tell him how amazing the robot race car was looking and ask Giant if he was finished yet. Giant would giggle and get back to work:
Our driver, ready and waiting.
Mathematically speaking, the project also lent itself to discovery of how connected parts related and affected one another:
And he explored how that relationship changed as more parts were added or altered:
While salvaging parts, Giant was delightedly sidetracked several times by a Whirly-Gizmo Daddy had built earlier:
I was quite impressed with both the instructions on the NXTprograms site and with Giant’s ability to look at the great diagrams and copy them:
Often it was him scrolling down and telling me what we needed next or how we’d be putting parts together—the instructions were that simple!:
Thankfully my limited ability to explain where a part should go (“Now stick that little black thing with the slits on it in the middle of the five hole long part under that L connector thing.”) was overcome by the easy to understand diagrams (“There.” Pointing.)
Giant plugged it in:
And, 1.5 hours from when we started, Giant stuck the ever-so-patient-and-encouraging Driver on:
And showed it off to his brother:
…Then he sat back and played with Daddy’s Whirly Gizmo some more.
I’m looking forward to Enchanting this Minion to life with Giant. However, I think for our next robot project math lesson, we’ll build something with a bigger impact for a 4 year old…like a Whirly-Gizmo thing ;). Perhaps we need to get a Pico-Cricket kit (like the ones Daddy uses for his Summer course) for ourselves!